Leading a church and believing in the Power of the Holy Spirit to break in and restore the Kingdom of God on the Kingdom of earth can sometimes be a difficult position to hold.

Why I hear you ask?

Well….. because its intangible, inconceivable and might I be too bold if I say…..unpredictable. In human terms its hard to comprehend, at least in a western, enlightenment influenced context. And lets be honest, we really don’t like anything we can’t comprehend. We love having knowledge, we value it and value those who possess it. Its not that knowledge is bad of course but our worship of it most certainly is.

In simplistic terms, human beings order the world dialectically. Incapable of perceiving randomness, we insist on imposing order on any observed phenomena, any new information that comes our
“way:

John Yorke – Into the Woods

In short – We don’t like mystery

Its so true yet its a huge issue when it comes to how we as the church live out our calling in these days. We serve a God who exists outside of the constructs we understand. He isn’t bound by time, space, or matter, and that is way beyond our comprehension. He can be anywhere, everywhere, at any time, every time.

Faced with our reluctance for mystery and/or our desire for order we are likely to embrace some predictable and dangerous responses.

• Reduce the unexplainable – a natural reaction to our inability to understand the unexplainable, supernatural parts of following Jesus is to reduce either what He did, or His expectation of what we should do. We look at miracles in the gospel and try to explain them by more natural phenomenon or we try to conclude that those things were for then and whilst the odd time we might see something it shouldn’t be a daily expectation.
• Deny the unexplainable – sometimes we take it a step further and lose all expectation that anything outside our knowledge can happen. We may hold a biblical theology for the miraculous but not any sort of practical theology.
• Denounce those who accept the unexplainable – unfortunately the first two often go hand in hand with this one. Because the unexplainable threatens us we are nervous of anyone who might attempt to engage. They are called unbiblical, unrooted, unrealistic (you can add any other ‘uns’ you would like to). We try to find holes in where they get it wrong. The ironic thing is because these people are trying to live a life engaging with the unexplainable it often can be easy to find what is perceived as a wrong.
• Elevate the explainable – Philip Yancey once said “A society that denies the supernatural usually ends up elevating the natural to supernatural status.” How true is that? I’ve been so guilty of this and I’ve watched the church over the years that I’ve been a part of it do the same over and over again.

I’m fine with us trying to grappel and wrestle with the unanswered questions of faith. My only condition is that this pursuit is one filled with wonder, expectancy and curiosity rather than religion, fear and cynicism. We can search for answers but we must be content with the fact that we wont get answers to all our questions. And when we cant get those answers we mustn’t shrink back, but push in further again and again.

We wont be able to explain everything but I’m up for experiencing everything that God has in mind for us.